Orders of spirits.
Between heaven and earth, between God and man, comes the mediate and composite order of “angelic creation.” “With the divinity of the stars” the members of this order share the attribute of deathlessness; with man they have this in common, to be stirred by passion and impulse.[284] Between sun and moon are benevolent angels who act as mediums between God and man. Other spirits inhabit the air beneath the moon. Some of them display an affinity to the near-by ether and fire, and live in tranquillity and mental serenity, although dwelling in the air. A second variety are the genii who are associated each with some man from birth to warn and guide him. But in the lower atmosphere are disorderly and malignant spirits who often are divinely commissioned to torment evil-doers, or sometimes torment men of their own volition. Often they invisibly invade human minds and thoughts by silent suggestion; again they assume bodies and take on ghostly forms. These Bernard calls angelos desertores, or fallen angels. But there are still left to be noted the spirits who inhabit the earth, on mountains or in forests and by streams: Silvani, Pans, and Nerei. They are of harmless character (innocua conversatione) and, being composed of the elements in a pure state, are long-lived but in the process of time will dissolve again.[285] This classification of spirits seems to follow Martianus Capella.
The stars rule nature and reveal the future.
Bernard’s assertion that the stars are gods is accompanied, as one would naturally expect, by a belief in their control of nature and revelation of the future. From their proximity to God they receive from His mind the secrets of the future, which they “establish through the lower species of the universe by inevitable necessity.”[286] Life comes to the world of nature from the sky as if from God, and the creatures of the earth, air, and water could not move from their tracks, did they not absorb vivifying motions from the sky.[287] Nous or Intelligence says to Nature, “I would have you behold the sky, inscribed with a multiform variety of images, which, like a book with open pages, containing the future in cryptic letters, I have revealed to the eyes of the more learned.”[288] In another passage Bernard affirms that God writes in the stars of the sky what can come “from fatal law,” that the movements of the stars control all ages, that there already is latent in the stars a series of events which long time will unfold, and that all the events of history, even the birth of Christ, have been foreshadowed by the stars.
“Scribit enim caelum stellis totumque figurat
Quod de fatali lege venire potest,
Praesignat qualique modo qualique tenore
Omnia sidereus saecula motus agat.
Praejacet in stellis series quam longior aetas
Explicet et spatiis temporis ordo suis: